The Front Row: “Harlem Nights”

When I was writing about Eddie Murphy recently, I forgot that he had directed himself in one—exactly one—movie; it was in 1989, and it’s drastically different in substance and tone from the movies that have, since then, made his fame. That film, “Harlem Nights,” is a gangster film, a blend of comedy and drama, set briefly in 1918 and then mainly in 1938, centered on a swanky after-hours joint called Sugar Ray’s. Ray (Richard Pryor) is a small-time gambling boss who adopts a hot-headed orphan who, as Ray comes up in the world, grows up to be his right-hand man, an impetuous trouble-maker nicknamed Quick (played by Murphy). The comedy and the drama alike have the air of legend, of tall but exemplary tales of the sort that Murphy may have grown up on, of the sort that bypassed the press and, like most salient aspects of the lives of African-Americans, fell by the wayside of official culture and journalism and were passed down from generation to generation. The movie is a whirlingly divergent romp, blending serious violence with outrageous comedy, but it has the feel of oral history, of lives and times rescued from oblivion. It’s a deeply personal film that reaches back archeologically into Murphy’s comedic persona, his very identity, while still remaining distanced from the furies of performance itself, of the most intimate psychological forces. For that, decades later, he made “Norbit.”